CIOs and their IT teams must adopt solutions that give a holistic overview of the network if they are to succeed in developing an infrastructure that supports working from anywhere. Elie Dib, Senior Vice President, EMEA at Riverbed Technology, says 2021 must be the year of establishing infrastructure everywhere and CIOs and their teams need to embrace this and ensure they have the best technology solutions to support it.
The office life employees once knew is a thing of the past. Whether indefinite remote working or widening the options for employees to work flexibly. It is safe to say the routine of daily commutes and 9-5, five days a week office environment is unlikely to return in 2021. In fact, some businesses such as Nationwide in the UK have already started rolling out permanent ‘work from anywhere’ initiatives. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that recent research from Riverbed found that businesses are expecting a 50% increase in employees working remotely post-COVID-19. This shift brings increasing pressure for CIOs to establish a consistent infrastructure that can support employees working everywhere and anywhere.
The key to ensuring an ‘infrastructure everywhere’ setup flourishes is gaining strong visibility over the network and optimising performance of applications that businesses have come to rely on over the last 12 months – regardless of which location employees are working from.
So, to really understand the importance of establishing an ‘infrastructure everywhere’ setup, we need to look back at how the work lives of employees have changed and the challenges that we have had to overcome.
The necessity of ‘infrastructure everywhere’ and getting it right
With March 23 marking a year since the UK went into lockdown, it also signposts – for many organisations – the start of having to completely transform their business operations. Overnight enterprises across multiple industries – from financial services, to retail, the public sector and manufacturing – quickly accelerated their Digital Transformation initiatives. In addition, many businesses rapidly embraced new technologies as they facilitated operations that simply had never had to function remotely.
To tackle the challenge of now being remote working offices, the first requirement for a lot of organisations was the adoption of SaaS applications and collaboration tools such as Slack, Zoom and Office 365. In fact, in Zoom’s latest quarterly results, the company reported its total global revenue for the quarter to be up 369% year-over-year as it remained a critical communication and collaboration service during the pandemic. Solutions such as these have been vital for businesses to remain productive as lockdowns across Europe have remained in place over the past 12 months.
However, the adoption of these new technologies has not been without its challenges for CIOs and their IT teams. Not only did these teams have to manage the influx of new applications and personal devices onto the network, they had to do so with minimal visibility over what was happening, where it was happening and when. As a result, businesses are vulnerable to security threats and inefficiencies in the network. If left undetected, these threats could hinder efficiency of application performance, damage employee productivity and ultimately have detrimental financial impact on the wider business.
The businesses that ignore these issues and fail to establish an ‘infrastructure everywhere’ setup will be the ones leaving themselves ill-equipped to deal with the employee demands of working anywhere. As we continue to progress through 2021, it’s time for CIOs and their teams to embrace infrastructure everywhere and ensure they have the best technology solutions to support this.
Gaining visibility and addressing performance issues is key to success
While employees become accustomed to being able to work from anywhere – whether it be in a café, at the office, at home or while they’re waiting for the car to be fixed – it is vital that CIOs and their IT teams have the right visibility and performance solutions in place. It is simply not an option for there to be SaaS applications and collaboration tools that are slow, inefficient or temperamental as this could lead to considerable impact on employee productivity and business growth. CIOs and the IT teams need to adopt solutions that give a holistic overview of the network if they are to succeed in developing an infrastructure that supports working from everywhere.
To achieve this, businesses must invest in network performance management (NPM) solutions that collect and analyse data flowing through every application from each device in use. Armed with these insights, IT teams can quickly identify what problems are occurring and take the necessary steps to resolve them, regardless of where employees are working from. For example, application acceleration tools can be installed to manage both bandwidth and latency fuelled network problems caused by bandwidth-hungry applications such as video conferencing. In using complementary application acceleration and network performance management solutions, IT teams are able to optimise the performance of the network, prevent any negative impact from slow-running systems and enable employees to effectively and productively work from anywhere.
Optimising infrastructure everywhere
As the vaccine continues to rollout and it remains hopeful lockdowns will ease during the year, it is clear the days of spending our entire working week in an office environment are gone. As such, 2021 must be the year of establishing infrastructure everywhere – underpinned by the correct network visibility and application performance tools that will maintain employee experience. By adopting the right solutions, businesses can operate with the assurance that employees can remain productive and continue to drive innovation for the wider business, irrespective of whatever location they are working from, this year and beyond.
